World leaders convene in Kananaskis, Alta., for the G7 summit on Tuesday at the invitation of Prime Minister Mark Carney.STEFAN ROUSSEAU/AFP/Getty Images
It’s a heck of a thing to know that you’re living inside a future history textbook – we all agree that’s what’s going on here, right? – but to have no idea where you are in the book at the moment.
Are we a little fact box halfway down a page for some bored undergrad 100 years from now to skim about a strange interlude that gripped the world briefly once upon a time? Or are we currently living inside Chapter 2 of a 400-page textbook that will one day anchor a course entirely focused on, well, whatever is settling in here?
Either way, the G7 summit in Kananaskis, Alta., earlier this week was less a meeting than a perfect metaphor: The new state of the world, arrayed around one circular table in the pornographically Canadian beauty of the Rocky Mountains.
There were the leaders of the world’s largest advanced economies, gathered together as the embers of war smouldered in the Middle East, Russia staged its deadliest attack on Kyiv this year, and the full scale of what U.S. President Donald Trump intends and can get away with is not yet clear.
The U.S. was both the biggest presence at the summit – the gorilla on whose shoulders the globe rests, at least until he gets an itch and shrugs us all into oblivion – and entirely absent, a sucking black hole the shape and size of its former stature. The G7 revolved around Mr. Trump the way a funeral revolves around a screaming toddler in the third pew – it isn’t how anyone wants to spend their time or energy, because there are much heavier things going on, but the noise demands to be accommodated.
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Prime Minister Mark Carney, as G7 chair, delivered opening remarks while the cameras were still in the room. French President Emmanuel Macron sat on the Prime Minister’s right and Mr. Trump to his left, looking bored and vaguely resentful, as he always does when the words are coming from someone else’s mouth instead of his own.
“We’re gathering at one of those turning points in history – I think we all recognize that – a turning point where the world looks to this table for leadership,” Mr. Carney said.
Was he talking about Israel and Iran, or Russian President Vladimir Putin’s vicious hunger, or how the world order that stood for decades has been smashed like a Lego house dropped on the floor? Was he nodding at artificial intelligence, on which the assembled leaders would issue a blandly useless statement at the end of the summit?
Or, was Mr. Carney talking about the Creamsicle-coloured plasticine volcano sitting just off his left elbow?
“Nostalgia isn’t a strategy. We have to change with the times and to build a better world,” the Prime Minister continued, turning toward Mr. Trump. “Some of you – such as you, Mr. President – have anticipated these massive changes and are taking bold measures to address that.”
Prime Minister Mark Carney, in his remarks, at the summit said the world is at a 'turning point.'Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press
The surgical ambiguity of this phrase recalled Mr. Carney describing him during their Oval Office meeting in May as a “transformational President.”
Mr. Trump has more than earned both of those superlatives. Here’s a short list of other things that could be considered transformational and bold: a stunning new building added to a city skyline; a visionary leader who reshapes their nation for the better; a transcendent work of art or rock album that instantly changes the canon.
And a few more things that could also reasonably be described as bold and/or transformational: a category 5 hurricane; a wrecking ball slamming through your living room wall while you watch the baseball game; Norovirus at a wedding.
These adjectives are, as Mr. Carney shimmied away from explaining when a journalist asked what exactly he meant, “Yin and yang.” The Prime Minister has perfected this rhetorical sleight of hand, in which he says something that registers in the President’s preening brain as a deserved tribute to genius and potency, while everyone else can see the other image in the hologram.
It was a remarkable tableau, that table. Myriad global crises were building in the world outside, but the response of everyone in the room was hampered by the fact that another emergency with veto power was sitting across the table in a too-long tie.
The summit might as well have been a museum installation illustrating whatever future history class we’re living inside right now. Geopolitics in 2025: What happens when the world’s policeman is the one you have to worry about.
Mr. Trump would leave the meeting early, ostensibly to quell the tinderbox in the Middle East. He did this by returning to Washington to mash out a series of unhinged social media posts that seemed to be begging for all-out war.
But before the President left Kananaskis, he and Mr. Carney held a bilateral meeting. The way these things go, there’s always a pretend version of the meeting in front of the cameras, before they kick the media out so the real meeting can happen.
Every question from the reporters revolved around Mr. Trump’s version of reality, his moods and whims and wants. None of his answers made a lick of sense, and no one got anything useful or even coherent out of him. Eventually, he devoted himself to an unprompted, extended whine about Mr. Putin having been ejected from the G8 years earlier after invading Crimea.
“It was a mistake in that you spend so much time talking about Russia, and he’s no longer at the table,” Mr. Trump said. “So it makes life more complicated.”
Sometimes, the problem you spend so much time talking about is right there at the table with you, and you’re no better off.